As more and more technologies arise, companies want to develop applications for multiple platforms using a single code base. This is known as hybrid application development. Today, you can make a website with certain code and that code will also produce Android app, iOS app, Windows app and BlackBerry app. This sounds so much of productivity with little work. But in contrary, this is very devastating and inefficient. These hybrid apps lack a lot of functionality and swerve users away from the native look and feel they have adjusted themselves to.

One of the most robust Hybrid Android app development technologies is React Native. Using React Native you will develop “native” Android apps and “native” iOS apps. How, you may ask? Well, React Native is an ambitious open source project by Facebook (more details here). You can use React Native with the native languages for Android and iOS.

It surely is very difficult and time consuming to maintain different code bases for same application. If there’s a new update, we will need to add it separately for Android and iOS projects. Hybrid application development may be solving this with a single code base, but there are lots of compromises first. The user experience, the flexibility and the overall efficiency of the app is compromised.

Still, why is Hybrid application development popular? For simple yet elegant applications which don’t require hectic resources, this is a good option. It’s still a long way to go for these hybrid development platforms before they can completely replace the traditional methods. Till then, let’s just brace ourselves for the horrors of maintaining different code bases.